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LXer Weekly Roundup for 09-May-2010

In the Roundup this week we have a Faster and better Chrome 5 as well as 5 things you didn’t know VLC could do, Why rejecting Microsoft’s OSS contributions is counter-productive, Upgrading your distro should come with a warning and more. Enjoy!

No More Cheap Supercomputers? Sony Blocks Linux on PS3: Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) faces a class action lawsuit following a recent an update to its PlayStation 3 console that removes the ability to put alternate operating systems on the console. The late March update for the PlayStation 3 restricts the installation of an alternative operating system to the console's native OS. The feature, called 'Install Other OS,' has been removed, three years after the console's introduction, "due to security concerns," the company said in a blog post.

CLI on the Web: ..ECMA CLI would have given the web both strongly typed and loosely typed programming languages. It would have given developers a choice between performance and scriptability. A programming language choice (use the right tool for the right job) and would have in general made web pages faster just by moving performance sensitive code to strongly typed languages.

Chrome 5: Faster and Better: The first thing you'll notice with Google's new beta of its Chrome Web browser is that it's faster, much faster, than the last version. You don't need any fancy tests to see that. All you have to do is use it and you'll see that it blows other browsers away.

4.4.3 Is Upon Us: KDE today released the 3rd monthly update to the 4.4 series, bringing a slew of bugfixes and translation updates to our users. Konsole has seen some love, so has Okular. Check out the changelog to get to know more about it. This release, as all our x.y.z releases (where z > 0) does not contain new features but concentrates on stabilizing the existing codebase. As such, the upgrade should be safe and painless, so we recommend updating to everyone running previous KDE SC versions.

5 Things You Didn’t Know VLC Could Do: There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with VLC, the high quality audio and video player for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Its speed, portability, and built-in support for most common codecs make VLC an extremely popular choice for playing video. While that’s all well and good, VLC can do a lot more than basic video playback, including things like video encoding, DVD ripping, volume normalization and more. Today we’ll look at some of VLC’s most interesting and little-known features that help make this an indispensable application for nearly all desktop platforms.

Upgrading your distro should come with a warning: It's that time of year again when a lot of the major distros are putting out new releases, and people are clambering to get the new versions installed. But there are two camps of people in this rush to get the latest and greatest. The upgraders, who prefer to leave their computer as is, and hit the "upgrade" button, hoping to come back to their computers in a couple hours and revel in their shiny new OS. Then their are those who prefer the "clean install" by backing up any important stuff, wiping the drive, and starting from scratch. But is the upgrade method really worth it?

Tilting at Windows. Why rejecting Microsoft’s OSS contributions is counter-productive: Yesterday I had a look at the response of the Joomla! community to the news that Microsoft had signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement and was contributing code to the content management project. You probably won’t be surprised to find that some people don’t like the idea. The speed and vehemence of their rejection of Microsoft’s involvement in the project is entirely predictable, but none the less depressing for that.

Linux needs to do more for programmers: Much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft does some things better, much better, than Linux. Number one with a bullet is how Microsoft helps programmers and ISVs (independent software vendors). MSDN (Microsoft Software Developer Network) is a wonderful online developer resource. Linux has had nothing to compare. True, there is the Linux Developer Network, which, when it began, looked like it would be the Linux equivalent of MSDN, but it hasn't lived up to its promise. And, I can't overlook the Linux Foundation's Linux training classes. But, if I'm an ISV and I want to write software for Linux, I'm still going to need to piece together a lot of it by myself.

I had an epiphany (about Epiphany): The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects). But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager. What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.